December 27th: Server Upgrade

Today was not too productive.

I got out of bed at around 10:30AM. Instead of working on practice problems for the robotics programming sub-team, I decided to upgrade my server.

Today I applied new thermal paste on the GPU and the CPU. The GPU honestly didn't matter too much but I applied the thermal paste on the GPU first just as a test run. It was a GT9500, and if I ended up breaking it, I could just use integrated graphics. It's not like the graphics were going to matter on the server since I want to use Ubuntu Server headless anyways, but by mitigating the load off of the integrated graphics, hopefully it would reduce the heat build up on the chip.

I initially had many problems with removing the crusty thermal paste because the GPU was probably older than me. However, after using a hair dryer on the hottest setting, I managed to get the old thermal paste off of the heat sink. For the thermal paste on the actual chip, I just plugged the graphics card back and stress tested the server for a couple minutes so that the card would naturally get warmer from the extra heat produced by the CPU. Then, I was able to scrape off the last parts of thermal paste.

When I first applied the new thermal paste I didn't expect the consistency to be so watery, so I had to try again. Then, I screwed everything back in for the GPU, and when I turned on the server, it worked.

Then, I had to tackle the CPU, the main heat producer of the server. I got the heatsink and fan off of the chip. For some reason, the screws attaching the heatsink and the fan were really hard to get off, so I just used a screwdriver and a vacuum to get the dust outside of the ridges. Fortunately, the thermal paste for the CPU wasn't so crusty and was somehow still pasty despite 10 years, which was good for me. I removed the thermal paste and put 4 dots for each corner on the CPU and re-installed the heat sink.

Then, when I stress tested the server, temperatures dropped to just 60 degrees Celsius compared to the 72 degrees Celsius yesterday, which is a very good 12 degree improvement!

After that, I tried to install Ubuntu Server. I initially wanted to use SSH for regular purposes and xRDP for anything else, like updating server JARs, but that meant that I would still have to install a desktop environment. I started by installing the normal ubuntu-desktop package, but for some reason, the internet didn't work despite me being connected to the server via xRDP, which was very weird. So I reset and tried xfce, but I couldn't modify the network configuration or connect to the internet online. So I uninstalled xRDP and xfce because it was like 2AM.

I'll try to be more productive tomorrow.

Thanks for reading,
Issac